Mettavolution

The Mexican duo’s first album in five years applies their customary virtuoso classical guitar to six short originals and a 19-minute cover of Pink Floyd’s “Echoes.”

The story of Rodrigo y Gabriela’s big break almost sounds made up. In 2006, a year in which “thrash metal / instrumental flamenco / acoustic covers” was something you might actually have seen on the MySpace page of a band trying to steal a second glance with facetious tags, the duo emerged delivering a genuine fusion of all those things with dead-serious eyes and the bona fides to back it up. Their self-titled second studio album from that year—complete with covers of Metallica and Led Zeppelin standards—debuted at No. 1 in Ireland, where they’d been living, busking, and refining their two-classical-guitar m.o. after several years stalling out in Mexico’s metal scene. The names below them on that week’s top ten were certainly no jokes: Kelly Clarkson, Arctic Monkeys, Coldplay, Gorillaz, Johnny Cash.

As they began playing increasingly big stages—all the way up the White House—Rodrigo Sanchez and Gabriela Quintero remained loyal to the equation that helped get them there. Their albums have followed concepts—dedicating each song on 11:11 to one of their musical influences; doing the same for late historical figures on 9 Dead Alive; making a band-backed album with Area 52—but it’s a safe bet that they’ll never abandon their audience by, say, banishing classical guitars, or discontinuing the tributes. Mettavolution, which devotes its second half to a movement-for-movement cover of Pink Floyd’s 24-minute epic “Echoes,” is their first new album in five years and a humble addition to the one-of-a-kind house that they’ve kept for over 10 years.

The most glaring downside to their approach here is that there’s simply not that much original material, especially for the duo’s first release since 2014. With six shorter songs leading up to the Floyd finale, it feels more like an EP with a jackpot of a bonus track—not least of all because each half contrasts so starkly with the other. The first grits its teeth and charges forward: The crunching “Terracentric” and the blurrily agile lines on “Witness Tree” move like hand-cranked cars on a slotted track, wound up by Sanchez and Quintero’s extremely athletic wrists and then turned loose. The dance break “Cumbé” and its slower-breathing follower “Electric Soul” simmer down a bit and lay out their chemistry more simply, to warmer and more pleasant effect, but the dominant energy in part one is fast, heavy, and relentlessly precise.

“Echoes,” meanwhile, re-examines the original with a magnifying glass on texture. While Floyd had a bigger, more amplified setup from which to survey outer space, Rodrigo y Gabriela cleverly and resourcefully get small. Two-thirds of the way through the song (which, on Floyd’s Meddle, also occupied the second half of the album), it rests, suspended. For about two minutes here, Sanchez and Quintero offer some of their most impressive musicianship on the whole record: anti-shredding, actively resisting their signature instincts and thoroughly clearing the air. You can hear every tiny sound they make, down to the friction from each contour of their fingertips as they lightly skim up and down the nylon strings.

Very few groups could pull off a single cover song for 50 percent of an LP without seeming at least a little creatively complacent. But for Rodrigo y Gabriela, interpretation is a founding virtue. In fact, it has always comprised about half of their process—whether in playing covers, honoring another artist’s body of work, or just filtering one generations-old style of music through the language of another. Mettavolution reassures that for as long as they’re around, Rodrigo y Gabriela will be echoing their influences as only they can.